Bickle2 said:

Nintendo does this at the beginning of every generation as I described.

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InterMusketeer said:

Okay, so you're just speculating. You don't seem to have any evidence to support your statements after all. Also, those CoD games were released throughout the lifespan of the Wii, not just at the start, so it doesn't quite match your story there.

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Bickle2 said:

Well, it’s representative of their costs. Nintendo still thinks it’s 1992, which is the root of basically every problem they’ve had since thr N64. They follow basic business, control supply to create demand. Because they think they’re a toy company which operates mostly on short term fads, (a toy that remains a best seller for 4 years is extraordinarily rare) they short supplies of consoles and games (and were caught many times in the S/NES days doing so), and make sure “Switch will be available on Sunday!” Keeps them in the news. Eventually this strategy costs too much money and they behave like an electronics manufacturer thst actually wants to sell product.

By not establishing a manufacturing center on each continent, preferably several in North America (where an east coast center can subsidize Europe), they drive costs up exponentially for publishers. Not to mention the 3-4 weeks on a boat and customs before it even hits a warehouse. Oh, and thr digital versions have to be the same price, or the retailers, where the majority of sales take place, will refuse to carry it. If you think this isn’t a factor, check out how GameStop consoles come with physical discs instead of download codes (which is extraordinarily cheaper, not just because of the lack of media, but the cost of shipping consoles to the host country, where a seperate Crew has to insert those physical discs into the box and seal it. Download codes can be printed anywhere, months in advance of the game going gold)

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Bickle2 said:

1* I’d say, without specific knowledge that it smells like a parity clause with Nintendo, since like I said they almost certainly financed a large portion of the remaster. They can’t enforce performance parity, since there’s about a 1500%+ performance gap between Switch and an X , but they can match the pain in the ass.

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Bickle2 said:

2* John Carmack is brilliant, and ID tech is incredibly scalable. That’s ehy it runs as well as it does on Switch.

Once they run out of 360 ports, (Wolfenstein heavy lifting was done on the first one on 360),they’re going to be in trouble

Non-Nintendo ports and remakes aren’t going to sell past the honeymoon period on Switch, with exceptions like Minecraft and Rocket League, more importantly th cost of producing those ports without a 360 or PS3 version to source from will be prohibitive. 3* That’s what happened with the Wii. No one bought them, and the huge expense of producing a custom version was prohibitive, no matter how big the installed base was, they only showed up for first party and a handful of titles that appeal to the core Nintendo audience.

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Bickle2 said:

*4 Nintendo paid for them, and performance was far closer. The Switch is essentially Xbox 360 Pro, the Xbox One is almost 4x faster with twice the RAM.
They have to essentially start from scratch to make a Switch version of most AAA games.

Let’s put it in perspective. The sum total of Wii Call of Duty sales is 2 million less than Ghosts on 360. That’s all of them, combined. Activision told them to stuff it on WW2 because the cost of porting it far exceeded any sales they expected to get, and the likelyhood of selling season pssses even in amounts to cover the ports is dim. Arkham Origins canned their DLC because if every single person who bought the game bought the season pass, the cost of porting the base game to WiiU might have hit break even. You had to sell half a million copies of a AAA game to make the port on 360 or PS3 (assuming one or the other was the lead platform) last generation, and like I said, these are requiring ground up rebuilds, which is far more costly than a straight port. /

5*Bottom line, on the most extreme examples, the margins were barely there on a console that ended up selling 70 million units (true, half of them were stuck under beds and in closets when bowling got boring), no one is going to take the risks ten years later with costs being exponentially higher until these remakes prove a huge market. Don’t hold your breath. This cycle has been repeating for well over a decade. Nintendo is sure this time will be different, pays for ports of games that are popular elsewhere, then scratches their heads as to why they don’t sell well for them when they ship highly inferior versions with a slapped on gimmick. People buy Nintendo consoles to play Nintendo games, they don’t buy them to play third party. That they almost always have a PlayStation or Xbox or PC

EDIT- The main question the developers have to ask is how many sales they will make by making a Switch version that they otherwise wouldn’t make (and some of those could be second copies) with customers buying in Xbox, Pc, or PS4 The answer is: not a lot.

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• 1.) Nintendo finances a game that will be in other platforms while the original IP owner is willing to jeopardize potential sales in the other platforms to inconvenience players? im out of words. How can one go from a solid post with reasonable arguments to this.
  
• 2.)Jhon Carmack is a genious indeed. However, last work of his was mostly at the begining of Rage tech, which is IDTech 5. After that the credit goes to other engine programmers, i think Tiago Sousa was involved with id at some stage after Carmack left. Of course correct me if im wrong since im recalling this for memory withotu a cuarrent fact check.
  
• 3.)"No one bought Wii ports." It's a rather absolute claim. There are various cases of good ports of good games that sold well. Even spin off of such games were profitable.
  
• 4.)Are you implying performance difference with the Wii and the 7th gen consoles was closer than Switch vs PS4 and X1? i have read this various times and it seems to be your claim. And that would be a no. While less powerful Switch at bare minimun has a more modern GPU architecture than PS4/X1 whereas the Wii was several generations behind in GPU feature set against the competition, it didn't even have fully programmable pixel shaders like the first Xbox did.
  
• 5.) Implying that the Wii sold 70 million consoles and still prolonging the myth that it didn't sold games? Console sold over a 100 million and Nintendo chose to stop production rather early. Regarding if people bought games or not for it, just search for any NPD threads were the discussion appeared 100s of times and the myth was debunked with factual numbers.

Refreshment.01 said:

*Note: i took the liberty to short some of the posts. However, these cuted parts don't affect the general context of what's been replied to.

http://m.neogaf.com/showpost.php?p=253064657

This is a well put and rather interesting post about NIntendo dubious busyness practices for people that might not know about that side of the company.

The problem is it comes as rather anachronistic and is basically cosidered in a vaccum. It is also strange how knowledgeable it is, but how it's at odds with other claims made in other posts passed as facts that seem questionable. The highlighted are some examples:

• 1.) Nintendo finances a game that will be in other platforms while the original IP owner is willing to jeopardize potential sales in the other platforms to inconvenience players? im out of words. How can one go from a solid post with reasonable arguments to this.
  
• 2.)Jhon Carmack is a genious indeed. However, last work of his was mostly at the begining of Rage tech, which is IDTech 5. After that the credit goes to other engine programmers, i think Tiago Sousa was involved with id at some stage after Carmack left. Of course correct me if im wrong since im recalling this for memory withotu a cuarrent fact check.
  
• 3.)"No one bought Wii ports." It's a rather absolute claim. There are various cases of good ports of good games that sold well. Even spin off of such games were profitable.
  
• 4.)Are you implying performance difference with the Wii and the 7th gen consoles was closer than Switch vs PS4 and X1? i have read this various times and it seems to be your claim. And that would be a no. While less powerful Switch at bare minimun has a more modern GPU architecture than PS4/X1 whereas the Wii was several generations behind in GPU feature set against the competition, it didn't even have fully programmable pixel shaders like the first Xbox did.
  
• 5.) Implying that the Wii sold 70 million consoles and still prolonging the myth that it didn't sold games? Console sold over a 100 million and Nintendo chose to stop production rather early. Regarding if people bought games or not for it, just search for any NPD threads were the discussion appeared 100s of times and the myth was debunked with factual numbers.

Some of the stuff is too far fetched when passed though the lens of critical thinking. Nintendo wouldn't intentiaonally risk the potential of it's console with intentional shortages. Less so in such an unstable climate and with a very risky product like the Switch.

If half of those horrible Nintendo practices was still in full effect and with so little for 3rd parties to win as you are claiming then i don't think they would bother with Nintendo at all.

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Bickle2 said:

1- Nintendo absolutely would and does. If you need proof, note that they are the only one of the 3 that consistently has mass shortages on launch, and for long periods afterwards. Either they have the worst manufacturing team in the business for the last thirty years, or they’re deliberately shorting. They have been caught over, and over and over shorting supply. Again, thye think they’re a toy company, and this is absolutely how toy companies operate. Interestingly enough, this is exactly what brought down Disney Infinity. They blew out v.1, and then grossly over manufactured 2.0. This sunk the entire endeavor, because they were stuck with millions of unsold figures that cost them many dollars each to manufacture. I believe Kotaku cited that they “sold a milllion hulk figure, but they made two million”. As far as jeopardizing the other platforms, they’re not. People are used to updates, they frankly won’t even really notice. Heck I just got Wheel of Fortune on disc, it had a larger update than the disc install as well.

There is of course a secondary, less likely explanation, which I don’t believe applies here. One way to get a discount on replication is to give it to them with a large space of time before you need them. Replicators will give discounts, sometimes large ones, for flexibility on when they run your discs. They want their lines moving 24 hours a day, and having things ready to run when someone is late in delivering assets, or the stamper has defects, or any number of issues is handy. So they take the things that won’t change and submit it.

2- it’s still People he trained, basing their work on tech he developed. The Wolfenstein for 360 that was undoubtedly the base of Wolf 2 on Switch was id tech 5, which was developed for Rage by Carmack. I doubt 6 is even close to a rewrite. Carmack designed 5 to scale down to iPhones, he was thinking mobile about ten years ago.

3- the sales numbers, using COD as an extreme example, were pithy by comparison. And don’t forget that Wii users didn’t buy DLC in any noticeable amount either. So not only did all of Wii COD combined sell less than a single 360 release, but there was none of that season pass income to be had. Certainly there are titles that appeal to the Nintendo audience that sold well like Just Dance and Rayman. Rock Band is a great example. The DLC and online were shut down on it long in advance of the post RB3 pause. Because no one was buying it. Look at the list of Best selling, even million plus selling WiI games, you have to hit thr botttom of the list to find a game that isn’t squarely in the Nintendo wheelhouse https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_Wii_video_games Third parties started bailing on Wii in its second year, and jumped ship even faster with WiiU. While the numbers are inflated, virtually all the best sellers were hardware pack ins, it sold games for Nintendo, but with a few exceptions no one else. And you can’t support a platform without those third party royalties, even if you’re selling hardware at a profit. Something that is more and more true every single day. If the Switch is moving third party AAA type software in large numbers 3 years in, I’m sure they’ll reconsider. But i seriously doubt this will be the case.

4- it was far easier to scale the games down to Wii from 360. The way new AAA games today are far and away beyond what the Switch could handle. Large online experiences in particular. No, this doesn’t affect indie style games. But if they say, want Red Dead 2 on it, I’d be very very surprised if thst were to come abiut, as that’s a complete ground up custom version. Something that was done. Their modern warfare and ghostbusters for example.

If I were Nintendo, I would have bailed out after WiiU. Used my clout to get long term, highly lucrative terms from the major distribution platforms, and start shipping games there and everywhere. It’s obvious Microsoft for example senses that the Rare IP isn’t as supportable on their own platform as they would like. Pure speculation, I wouldn’t be surprised to see a cross platform release as part of their new crossplay agreement. What better way to make a new Conker, or finally get that goldeneye remake rotting on a shelf released. It’s not going to last, just like it burned out for Wii.

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Bickle2 said:

1- Nintendo absolutely would and does. If you need proof, note that they are the only one of the 3 that consistently has mass shortages on launch, and for long periods afterwards. Either they have the worst manufacturing team in the business for the last thirty years, or they’re deliberately shorting. They have been caught over, and over and over shorting supply. Again, thye think they’re a toy company, and this is absolutely how toy companies operate. Interestingly enough, this is exactly what brought down Disney Infinity. They blew out v.1, and then grossly over manufactured 2.0. This sunk the entire endeavor, because they were stuck with millions of unsold figures that cost them many dollars each to manufacture. I believe Kotaku cited that they “sold a milllion hulk figure, but they made two million”. As far as jeopardizing the other platforms, they’re not. People are used to updates, they frankly won’t even really notice. Heck I just got Wheel of Fortune on disc, it had a larger update than the disc install as well.

There is of course a secondary, less likely explanation, which I don’t believe applies here. One way to get a discount on replication is to give it to them with a large space of time before you need them. Replicators will give discounts, sometimes large ones, for flexibility on when they run your discs. They want their lines moving 24 hours a day, and having things ready to run when someone is late in delivering assets, or the stamper has defects, or any number of issues is handy. So they take the things that won’t change and submit it.

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2- it’s still People he trained, basing their work on tech he developed. The Wolfenstein for 360 that was undoubtedly the base of Wolf 2 on Switch was id tech 5, which was developed for Rage by Carmack. I doubt 6 is even close to a rewrite. Carmack designed 5 to scale down to iPhones, he was thinking mobile about ten years ago.

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3- the sales numbers, using COD as an extreme example, were pithy by comparison. And don’t forget that Wii users didn’t buy DLC in any noticeable amount either. So not only did all of Wii COD combined sell less than a single 360 release, but there was none of that season pass income to be had. Certainly there are titles that appeal to the Nintendo audience that sold well like Just Dance and Rayman. Rock Band is a great example. The DLC and online were shut down on it long in advance of the post RB3 pause. Because no one was buying it. Look at the list of Best selling, even million plus selling WiI games, you have to hit thr botttom of the list to find a game that isn’t squarely in the Nintendo wheelhouse https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_Wii_video_games Third parties started bailing on Wii in its second year, and jumped ship even faster with WiiU. While the numbers are inflated, virtually all the best sellers were hardware pack ins, it sold games for Nintendo, but with a few exceptions no one else. And you can’t support a platform without those third party royalties, even if you’re selling hardware at a profit. Something that is more and more true every single day. If the Switch is moving third party AAA type software in large numbers 3 years in, I’m sure they’ll reconsider. But i seriously doubt this will be the case.

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• a)This does not support your claim that Wii sold "70 million and wasn't" been played.
• b)That wikipedia link you provided doesn't strength your point on the contrary. It says that there are 104 million sellers and a total of 919 million of software units sold which are the highest totals of the 360/PS3 generation. All of this with less published games than the other 2.
• c)If Nintendo games where in the other console platforms with similar numbers then a lot of 3rd parties would still be at the bottom of the list.
• d)For example, on the 360 the platform owner is the publisher with most million sellers on the list. So i don't why you present the fact in a negative light.
• e)Some Third party games put on good sales performance despite the fact that these publishers didn't put a good effort in the platform. The gross of 3rd party investment was sinked into 360/PS3 hight budget development even at the cost of closing studios. The Wii was the last bastion of Middle/B tier 3rd party development.
• f) Since games took less money to develop and anyway 3rd parties weren't investing much effort into developing Wii games, it meant it took less units to sale in order to get profits. That's why we got the shovelware wave even from the most unlikely sources and this exactly why money was been made in the Wii.

4- it was far easier to scale the games down to Wii from 360. The way new AAA games today are far and away beyond what the Switch could handle. Large online experiences in particular. No, this doesn’t affect indie style games. But if they say, want Red Dead 2 on it, I’d be very very surprised if thst were to come abiut, as that’s a complete ground up custom version. Something that was done. Their modern warfare and ghostbusters for example.

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If I were Nintendo, I would have bailed out after WiiU. Used my clout to get long term, highly lucrative terms from the major distribution platforms, and start shipping games there and everywhere. It’s obvious Microsoft for example senses that the Rare IP isn’t as supportable on their own platform as they would like. Pure speculation, I wouldn’t be surprised to see a cross platform release as part of their new crossplay agreement. What better way to make a new Conker, or finally get that goldeneye remake rotting on a shelf released. It’s not going to last, just like it burned out for Wii.

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Refreshment.01 said:

i don't think this answers how implausible is that Take 2 would jeopardize the sales of LA Noire by purposefully annoying buyers in other platforms and that Nintendo will finance the game that would appear in other devices day and day with the Switch version. This doesn't explain many other of your claims when for example, the Wii was outpacing the PS2 in sales when aligned in the first few years of it's life.

Did Nintendo do some of those questionable/dubious busyness practices? i would say yes. Are they doing it again to the extent you suggest with the Switch? Not even close.


i bothered to answer your Carmack take, even if a bit of topic (sorry), mainly because i share the idea that a single person shouldn't take full credit for what is the works of many. With that said, Tiago Sousa took the rains as chief engine programmer after Carmack left for id Tech 6 and he wasn't trained by Carmack.


i don't even know where to begin here since there's just too much wool to cut.

• a)This does not support your claim that Wii sold "70 million and wasn't" been played.
• b)That wikipedia link you provided doesn't strength your point on the contrary. It says that there are 104 million sellers and a total of 919 million of software units sold which are the highest totals of the 360/PS3 generation. All of this with less published games than the other 2.
• c)If Nintendo games where in the other console platforms with similar numbers then a lot of 3rd parties would still be at the bottom of the list.
• d)For example, on the 360 the platform owner is the publisher with most million sellers on the list. So i don't why you present the fact in a negative light.
• e)Some Third party games put on good sales performance despite the fact that these publishers didn't put a good effort in the platform. The gross of 3rd party investment was sinked into 360/PS3 hight budget development even at the cost of closing studios. The Wii was the last bastion of Middle/B tier 3rd party development.
• f) Since games took less money to develop and anyway 3rd parties weren't investing much effort into developing Wii games, it meant it took less units to sale in order to get profits. That's why we got the shovelware wave even from the most unlikely sources and this exactly why money was been made in the Wii.

This is not what facts tell us.

In the 6th gen, GC feature set was already laging behind by the time it debuted in 2001 when compared to Xbox. For the 7th gen, Wii hardware was basically an overclocked GC, so that meant it was behind in both horse power and GPU feature set. Switch on the other hand is ahead in terms of latter at least.

Your main example is Red Dead 2, which is an open world game. You should remember that Open World games became more common during the 7th generation of consoles. These Open World games are heavily dependant of RAM and access to mass storage for quick data streaming. 2 aspects in which the Switch is better positioned in relation to the competition than the Wii ever was.

For example, the gulf in usable memory for games between a Wii vs a PS3/X360 was MASSIVE in comparison to what the Switch offers against it's direct competitors.A raw calculation puts Wii with 19% of total memory against the competition. Yet on the other hand the Switch has about 64%. *DISCLAIMER: Before jumping into conclusions im not telling the Switch will get the most demanding games a PS4 or X1 got or will be getting.


Instead of making a long answer to this claim i' ll just say 1 thing:

Have you considered that maybe Nintendo is at stage were they could mostly support their platforms by themselves? Just look at past generation examples, specially Wii U and now Switch. At this point 3rd party support is a nice bonus for them.

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don't think this answers how implausible is that Take 2 would jeopardize the sales of LA Noire by purposefully annoying buyers in other platforms and that Nintendo will finance the game that would appear in other devices day and day with the Switch version. This doesn't explain many other of your claims when for example, the Wii was outpacing the PS2 in sales when aligned in the first few years of it's life.

Did Nintendo do some of those questionable/dubious busyness practices? i would say yes. Are they doing it again to the extent you suggest with the Switch? Not even close.

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Bickle2 said:

I’d say, without specific knowledge that it smells like a parity clause with Nintendo, since like I said they almost certainly financed a large portion of the remaster. They can’t enforce performance parity, since there’s about a 1500%+ performance gap between Switch and an X , but they can match the pain in the ass.

I don’t expect they’re going to be keeping the physical in print that long anyway, so I doubt it really bothers them long term, even though it certainly bothers the users.

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Bickle2 said:

The Wii was a fad, not a trend. So of course it did. Loads of people bought Wii and never knew it did anything but bowl. And when that got boring it went in the closet. Those same people jumped to mobile, or stopped caring about games just as they had before the Wii.

2-

A- Don't what you mean by this. If it's that they weren't being played, no they weren't, and third parties dumped it quickly. This is fact. Contemporary article

https://www.cnet.com/news/is-the-wii-a-fad/

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C- which is why the should go third party and eliminate the billions spent on hardware development, manufacture, marketing and support that they are mostly incompetent at.

D- because I'm not talking about Microsoft. Kinect Adventures is a bestselling title on 360 at 15 million. Like most of the top of the Nintendo list, it's a hardware pack in and therefore the numbers are skewed and invalid. At least with the Nintendo titles people definitely wanted them, I seriously doubt kinect adventures would've sold very many copies if it was separate

E-You got the shovelware wave because those games sold, and real games didn't. They were cheap to make and therefore profitable.

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Memory is hardly the only factor. CPU as well. The issue is scalability. Is it financially feasible to do the work to scale the game to the Switch's ability? My point was that the gulf in ability is far larger here. The Switch has no hard drive to cache to. It has under half the RAM, and it has to play in the sub 360 portable profile. Can they sell enough copies to make a profit? Unlikely.

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The cost of supporting a game hardware platform, especially without the platform controlled additional music and movie platforms Nintendo will never have, isnt tenable long term. There are so many costs that go into a console did you know for example, everything is paid for at retail? Your location on the shelves, where your demo kiosk is, appearances in the ads, the network of hundreds If not thousands of sales reps. All of this has to be paid for and a half dozen titles a year, no matter how many they sell aren't paying those bills. Launching a console is a $2-3 billion endeavor these days. Maintaining it hundreds of millions a year. And they've just as much as quintupled their manufacturing and distribution costs.

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